Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Direct Mail Appeal + Online Response

It must be National Infographic Week. After two infographics yesterday pertaining to email, today another one pushed into my e-mailbox, this time on direct mail. No earth-shaking factoids in this one, but one of its opening assertions is what caused me to scan through it. Simply: “…consumers prefer responding to direct mail via online means.” As […]

Learn More September 23, 2015

Battle Of The Email Infographics

Yep, we all know there’s a heap of money to be raised via email appeals. And our sector will send out billions of emails (I don’t think that’s an exaggeration) in the remaining months of this year to prove the point! So today, when I noticed a spiffy new infographic from Salsa Labs extolling email fundraising, […]

Learn More September 22, 2015

Afraid Of Urgent? Try Authentic.

Jeff Brooks at Future Fundraising Now wrote an interesting post last week about second-guessing donors. He was warning fundraisers not to make up stories about donors … what he referred to as “wild guesses about their behaviors that wander far away from what donors really do”. And he gave the example of worrying about how […]

Learn More September 21, 2015

Good News For A Friday

Just saw a brief analysis from Constant Contact of what gets emails opened. And it turns out that, as an industry, the nonprofit sector generates the highest open rates, with an average of 29%. If your organization regularly beats 29%, this is a good news Friday! Within the nonprofit sector, this study unfortunately only breaks out […]

Learn More September 18, 2015

I Told You It Would Never End!

Exactly two weeks ago I ‘boasted’ of my invitation to have dinner with Hillary Clinton … all I had to do was provide some further info about myself. Naturally it was a draw … a ‘come on’. I warned readers that — despite the fact that I’ve never responded to a Hillary email, the Clinton […]

Learn More September 17, 2015

Listening To The Data vs Data Denial

Many if not most Agitator readers are in the direct marketing side of fundraising. And therefore they should be swimming in valuable data with which to make smart decisions about ongoing and future fundraising investments and tactics. But, I wonder … is that really what happens? In some cases, too much data could get in […]

Learn More September 16, 2015